Glow-in-the-Dark Eyeball Jello Shots

More About This Recipe

• It’s Halloween and you need an eeewy hit for your creepy party. Well, gory ones, give these the evil eye: Glow-in-the-Dark Eyeball Jelly Shots!
  
  Ever since my nephew learned to do the evil eye when he was about a year old, strange looks like that give me the creeps.
  
  Picture it – a cute cuddly babe in a high chair, all grins and giggles. But on command (“Do the evil eye!”), he morphs in a nanosecond and stares you down with one ghoulish eyeball literally popping out of its socket and the other shaded by a furrowed brow.
  
  This literally melted a room of normally normal and rather reserved adults into a hot mess of laughing idiots. Sadistic, I know.
  
  But in the spirit of Happy Halloween partiers, sans the baby entertainer, we found this idea on the ‘net and gave it a spooky spin with a black light and some vodka.
  
  These Glow-in-the-Dark Eyeball Jelly Shots are evil looking, alright. Seriously creepy peepies. But they’re a ridiculously easy way to blast that blah bash into a straight up monster mash.
  
  Here are the deets:
  
  Step 1: Grab 8 "ice ball" molds. You can find these at kitchen stores. (Trays with rounded ice cubes work too -- and make more.)
  
  Step 2: Spray the insides of the molds lightly with cooking spray, then wipe them out with paper towels to leave just a slight film behind. This will make sure your eyeballs pop outta the molds later.
  
  Step 3: Sprinkle gelatin over tonic water in a pan and let it hang out there a couple minutes. Then turn the heat on low and stir to dissolve the gelatin.
  
  Step 4: Add a bit o' sugah and stir 'til it's dissolved. Then remove the pan from the heat and add the vodka. Yes, vodka. Notice there's no picture of that. Don't ask why.
  
  Step 5: Get yerself one-a these meat injector thingies for this part. They're cheap. Look by the turkey supplies at the store. This makes filling up these little spheres SO. MUCH. EZ. ER.
  
  Step 6: Line-em-up-n-fill-em-up. Eyeball assembly line. Yop.
  
  Step 7: Notice that little air pocket at the top. That will become the iris of the eyeball later. I know. Eeew.
  
  Step 8: Don't forget to plug the holes! Then put 'em all in the fridge for a few hours while you give your own eyeballs a rest.
  
  Step 9: Carefully remove the eyeballs from their molds. Now it's the eeewy gooey part. Use green or blue gel icing to fill in the hole at the top to make the iris of the eye.
  
  Step 10: Use black gel icing to make a large black dot in the center of the colored gel for the pupil of the eye. THIS is why I am not an optometrist.
  
  Step 11: I had to hold a cow's eye in my hands in junior high science class once. Yah, it was something like this.
  
  Step 12: Get in a little eyeball line, you little eyeballs, you! Here's what they look like when you're done.
  
  Step 13: Now hook up an el-cheapo black light to shine on those ogre eyes, then dim the lights. WHY? Because, Halloweenie, the tonic water in the jelly shots GLOOOOOWS under black light! No, really...it does!
  
  Step 14: Vodka ogre eyeballs. This will be a bash to remembah!
  
  Even more ghastly: Add red-icing for a bloodshot eyeball look.
  
  Eeewy gooey eyeballs … down the hatch! (Oh gag!)
  
  Make ‘em for the Kiddos?
  
  Sure! You can make these for a kid party, too. But, paaaleeeze omit the vodka and replace it with white grape juice. And maybe forget about the bloodshot thing too, unless you’ve got teens in the house -- then go ahead – make their day.